neilj
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Post by neilj on Aug 17, 2022 4:58:16 GMT
He's got a point, this will be a useful attack line for Labour. Despite her apparent Damascene moment, she was never a Brexiteer, just an opportunist
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neilj
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Post by neilj on Aug 17, 2022 6:07:23 GMT
Latest inflation rate even higher than predicted, with CPI going to a record 40 year high of 10.1%
Truss is going to have to get serious if she has any hope of preventing a tory collapse at the next election, telling workers outside London need to 'graft' more and giving tax cuts that favour the better paid wont cut it
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alurqa
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Post by alurqa on Aug 17, 2022 6:39:46 GMT
c-a-r-f-r-e-w Very interesting stuff about horizontal and vertical launches. Do I remember correctly that some of the Woomera launches were horizontal on rails that then turned vertical? Or was that just an idea that never happened? I've tried (not very hard) to google the answer. Anyway as there are some advantages to horizontal it makes me wonder why NASA and Musk don't use it at least some of the time. Or you could just lob them into orbit. Saves on the 747 bit. :-) www.spinlaunch.comedition.cnn.com/2022/06/14/tech/spinlaunch-ceo-yaney-interview-scn-spc-intl/index.htmlSpinLaunch wants to radically redesign rocketry. Will its tech work? A California startup wants to put satellites into a circular chamber and whip them around to more than 5,000 miles per hour before letting them burst out, allowing a rocket to fire up its engine only after it's escaped the smothering tug of Earth's gravity. Humanity has been putting objects into orbit for six decades now. This is not how it's been done. Is it possible? The answer is different depending on who you ask.
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alurqa
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Post by alurqa on Aug 17, 2022 6:58:12 GMT
I don't believe Musk knows what he's talking about. If you think about it, almost all of the velocity needed to put a satellite in orbit is horizontal, not vertical. Look at vertical launches and you see that the rocket launcher quite quickly turns over once it gets above the lower atmosphere. To get a launch vehicle to a height of 100 miles (160 km) requires a vertical speed of 1.8 km/s; to keep a satellite in orbit at this altitude requires a horizontal speed of around 8 km/s (5 miles/s). Oh I think he does.[1] Rockets need speed. The problem is the atmosphere gets in the way, so you need as little of your flight to occur within the atmosphere as possible. That's why they go straight up, they get through MaxQ, which depends on both velocity and air pressure, and then they can start to accelerate to the required orbital velocity. Once past MaxQ they can safely begin to increase the horizontal velocity component with less and less atmosphere to worry about. Concorde could only go so fast, and had to fly extremely high (but still in the atmosphere) to achieve this speed, simply because the atmosphere got in the way, as it were. It was fighting its own MaxQ, but in a different way. [1] He spent $100m of his own money to get Falcon 1 into orbit. Everybody thought he was crazy. When the Russians wouldn't sell him some of their old ICBMs, he had to build his rocket from scratch. Then no one would help him, no one from Nasa would work for him so he had to become his own chief engineer. Now everybody wants to be his friend. He recently raised another $200m of funding to keep his amazing Starship project going. :-)
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 17, 2022 7:01:53 GMT
I see all these encouraging polls suggesting support for public ownership of the utilities and railways, more progressive taxation, Labour's measures on energy prices and all sorts of measures promoting the common weal.
I now await, with baited breath, for the good citizens of this country to stop electing a party that has no intention of ever doing any of this and instead maybe putting someone in power who might.
The latest R&W poll suggesting Truss as PM beats Starmer by 4 points if there was an election tomorrow doesn't lead me to think that the altruism and noble sentiments expressed in these opinion polls is always a good guide to how people behave in the privacy of polling booths.
The elusive search for those key voting determinants still goes on for Labour, I think. What seals the deal for Starmer with this rather two faced and contrary electorate?
The Ming vase and those slippery floors.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 7:08:02 GMT
I see all these encouraging polls suggesting support for public ownership of the utilities and railways, more progressive taxation ...I now await, with baited breath, for the good citizens of this country to stop electing a party that has no intention of ever doing any of this and instead maybe putting someone in power who might. The problem is, Starmer has more or less said that Labour has "no intention of ever doing any of this". And none of them are any kind of Liberal policy either. So it's the Greens, in England at least. Who aren't going to win.
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Aug 17, 2022 7:12:33 GMT
That artice links a published paper and in the introduction it says " However, the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there."
What it contains is an analysis of cases locally demonstrating they clustered around the market. Thus its arguing the outbreak in Huanan began at the market.
Hardly surprising it began somewhere, however. A market is the sort of place you might expect to see an outbreak begin, somewhere people gather together closely and where a single source of infection might visit.
Curiously though it says two different strains were detected as part of the outbreak. Both type B and type A. Its being hypothesised that covid began as a transfer from an animal at this market. Presumably a very rare event if this is the unique starting point of an endemic animal disease transferring to humans. But actually its arguing two different variants transferred from presumably two different animals to two different humans at the market. But nowhere else on earth. Now thats somewhat unlikely.
The article reports that covid-2 positive test samples were found concentrating in one part of the market where there were live animals. Note, thats covid-2 not covid-19. A study of where the known human cases had visited didnt show concentration in this same area.
The study is based upon information handed over to the WHO by Chinese authorities. We know this concentrates on cases of covid identified from people seriously ill in hospital. There was no general screening of the population or testing to find people who had mild disease. There must have been thousands of such cases compared to hundreds receiving hospital care. Typical multipliers are at least 1000 self limiting case for every hospital case, based on final mortality in UK but it could be a lot higher. The overal mortality from covid in China is officially...negligible. A fraction of anywhere else.
I'd love to see a comparable study analysing patient data from hastings of the unidentified pneumonia cases in the local hospital over that winter.
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pjw1961
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Post by pjw1961 on Aug 17, 2022 7:15:55 GMT
The latest R&W poll suggesting Truss as PM beats Starmer by 4 points if there was an election tomorrow doesn't lead me to think that the altruism and noble sentiments expressed in these opinion polls is always a good guide to how people behave in the privacy of polling booths. The elusive search for those key voting determinants still goes on for Labour, I think. What seals the deal for Starmer with this rather two faced and contrary electorate? Starmer can't do anything about how Truss is viewed by the voters (although she might do that herself) but he can in respect of his own persona. The energy price cap policy was a good start. If he can come up with more eye-catching things of that sort public opinion regarding his Prime Ministerial qualities may shift.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 7:18:37 GMT
Starmer can't do anything about how Truss is viewed by the voters (although she might do that herself) but he can in respect of his own persona. The energy price cap policy was a good start. If he can come up with more eye-catching things of that sort public opinion regarding his Prime Ministerial qualities may shift. If Starmer can't beat Truss that would be worse than Corbyn not beating May. Everything is in Starmer's favour here and all he needs is a spine and a socialist vision.
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Aug 17, 2022 7:25:58 GMT
View AttachmentAnd repeat after me " it's got nothing to do with Brexit! "If you say it enough times the expulsion of bull shit will be sufficient to jet propel brexitania to la la land. The sun lit fields await fellow brexitoids. Is it odd how the UK export numbers have an imposed ripple with a period of 6 months? Whats causing that?
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 17, 2022 7:27:07 GMT
Starmer can't do anything about how Truss is viewed by the voters (although she might do that herself) but he can in respect of his own persona. The energy price cap policy was a good start. If he can come up with more eye-catching things of that sort public opinion regarding his Prime Ministerial qualities may shift. If Starmer can't beat Truss that would be worse than Corbyn not beating May. Everything is in Starmer's favour here and all he needs is a spine and a socialist vision. Hmmmm. OK then. Starmer weans voters off Truss's charms by a bold socialist vision. Let's give it a go then. See where it gets us. Or have we been there before many times? "I won't stop voting Tory until you give me a socialist vision." I've not heard many voters say that to me before.
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Post by EmCat on Aug 17, 2022 7:35:16 GMT
I don’t know about Woomera tbh. I know they tested some scramjet hypersonic tech a few years ago, but don’t know about rockets. Not sure either about NASA, but I did read Musk making some criticism of horizontal launches: "… it seems like...you're high up there and so surely that's good and you're going at...0.7 or 0.8 Mach and you've got some speed and altitude, you can use a higher expansion ratio on the nozzle, doesn't all that add up to a meaningful improvement in payload to orbit? The answer is no, it does not, unfortunately. It's quite a small improvement. It's maybe a 5% improvement in payload to orbit...and then you've got this humungous plane to deal with. Which is just like having a stage. From SpaceX's standpoint, would it make more sense to have a gigantic plane or to increase the size of the first stage by five percent? Uhh, I'll take option two. And then, once you get beyond a certain scale, you just can't make the plane big enough. When you drop...the rocket, you have the slight problem that you're not going the right direction. If you look at what Orbital Sciences did with Pegasus, they have a delta wing to do the turn maneuver but then you've got this big wing that's added a bunch of mass and you've able to mostly, but not entirely, convert your horizontal velocity into vertical velocity, or mostly vertical velocity, and the net is really not great." I don't believe Musk knows what he's talking about. If you think about it, almost all of the velocity needed to put a satellite in orbit is horizontal, not vertical. Look at vertical launches and you see that the rocket launcher quite quickly turns over once it gets above the lower atmosphere. To get a launch vehicle to a height of 100 miles (160 km) requires a vertical speed of 1.8 km/s; to keep a satellite in orbit at this altitude requires a horizontal speed of around 8 km/s (5 miles/s). While the main benefits of an air launch may be the shorter preparation time and the ability to launch when weather conditions would prevent a vertical launch, the main downside is the payload. Pegasus, according to its website, can launch a satellite of around 900kg. SpaceX Falcon 9, on the other hand, can launch around 22,000kg to low Earth orbit (or around 8,000kg to geosynchronous orbit.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 7:36:17 GMT
If Starmer can't beat Truss that would be worse than Corbyn not beating May. Everything is in Starmer's favour here and all he needs is a spine and a socialist vision. Hmmmm. OK then. Starmer weans voters off Truss's charms by a bold socialist vision. Let's give it a go then. See where it gets us. Or have we been there before many times? "I won't stop voting Tory until you give me a socialist vision." I've not heard many voters say that to me before. perhaps
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 7:36:58 GMT
Never a good idea to drink too early in the day, but I've ended up with a few horizontal lunches in my time.
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Aug 17, 2022 7:48:19 GMT
neilj - yes, it's a good package. We're now down to the barrel scrapings in terms of criticisms: in a move that will save people £1600, what about that £400; yes, but subsidising energy is a bad things; yes, it's good, but the Lib Dems said it first..... Withmassive tax cut promises, Truss opened the door for Labour on this one. Interesting listening to economists re the now steady 10% inflation rate. The points I gathered are:
1) We cannot subsidise everyone, so whatever resources there are need to go to the most in need. Dont think thats happening.
2) Bank of England increasing interest rates cannot stop the cause of this inflation which is rising commodity prices. When asked then why is the B of E doing this, interviewee replied its the only thing it can do.
3) However the goal of the bank may be to try to curtail subsequent inflation, ie when employees see 10% inflation and therefore want 10% wage rise, but they cannot have them. The idea would seem to be to impose a recessionary stimulus on the economy to reduce demand and therefore lower prices, but also to force employers to be tough with their employees, create fear of unemployment (fat chance what with brexit!).
4) Recession is inevitable. Anyone talking about boosting the economy, through tax cuts or anything else, is talking nonsense because while in the long term that might be the solution, its useless short or even medium term. Basically the only thing to do now is get out the national credit card again.
So. This is a man made crisis caused by world lockdown, heaped upon a world drive to discontinue use of fossil fuels. We succeeded in reducing the rate of production of fossil fuels and thus created a world shortfall and international economic crisis. The UK is in a uniquely bad position because of brexit.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 7:55:16 GMT
Have you tried Gaviscon.? That's for acid reflux. I find not watching misogynistic 'jokes' to be a good anti-nausea measure. Just a few additions to the excellent response from crossbat11You could find the "real meaning" in that word ,which he commends to you , by talking to women in India, or Pakistan-or Afghanistan where the West sent them back to the Middle Ages. But you would need to leave that cosy Western Armchair and experience real offence against women. ....or you could just have a look at J K Rowling's Twitter account.
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Post by johntel on Aug 17, 2022 7:55:22 GMT
View AttachmentAnd repeat after me " it's got nothing to do with Brexit! "If you say it enough times the expulsion of bull shit will be sufficient to jet propel brexitania to la la land. The sun lit fields await fellow brexitoids. Is it odd how the UK export numbers have an imposed ripple with a period of 6 months? Whats causing that? The ONS figures are not reliable, as they are belatedly admitting. From the June bulletin: "EU imports In January 2022, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) implemented a data collection change affecting data on imports from the EU to Great Britain (GB). As a result, our EU to GB import statistics from January 2022 are not directly comparable with previous months. HMRC has investigated the scale of the transition from the Intrastat survey to customs declarations data to assess whether the change represents a time series break between 2022 and previous years. Our recent article discusses the outcome of these investigations, concluding that there is a discontinuity of around 6% by value between the two compilation methods. We are considering possible options to adjust for this discontinuity; until then, we continue to advise caution when interpreting monthly trade statistics and will keep users informed of any further changes in data collection. EU exports HMRC plan to carry out a new investigation to assess the impact on GB exports to the EU when the compilation method changed at the beginning of 2021. The aim is to give further insight into the data collection changes".
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 8:00:27 GMT
"Wholesale energy prices rose across the Continent and in America amid continued concerns over shortages as Russia curtails gas supplies, French nuclear reactors suffer safety shutdowns and droughts threaten electricity supplies from other power plants. The increasing wholesale prices will feed through to household energy bills, with analysts at Auxilione yesterday increasing their forecasts once more: based on Monday’s closing prices, they now see bills hitting £4,650 a year in January and £5,456 in April. At present the energy price cap stands at £1,971 a year, but it is forecast to jump by more than 80 per cent to £3,635 a year from October."
"“Supply continues to look tight, with concerns over the future of Russian gas flows, low availability of the French nuclear fleet, increasing Asian LNG [liquified natural gas] demand and now concerns that transportation of fuels may be restricted due to low river levels.”
"In a sign of the scramble for supplies, it emerged yesterday that a cargo of LNG from Australia was destined to arrive in Britain for the first time in at least six years, according to data from Kpler and Bloomberg.
Lu Ming Pang, an analyst at Rystad Energy, said gas prices had increased because of “maintenance at the Kollsnes gas processing plant and the Troll field that commenced over the weekend, reducing Norwegian flows”.
Meanwhile, the heatwave has caused havoc for power supplies as water levels in the Rhine have fallen so low as to inhibit the transport of coal and diesel to power plants along the river, he said.
“To make matters worse, warm temperatures have rendered cooling operations at riverside power stations inefficient. The reduction in water levels has also stopped several nuclear power plants from drawing more water from the river for crucial cooling processes.”"
Times today
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 17, 2022 8:02:06 GMT
I don't believe Musk knows what he's talking about. If you think about it, almost all of the velocity needed to put a satellite in orbit is horizontal, not vertical. Look at vertical launches and you see that the rocket launcher quite quickly turns over once it gets above the lower atmosphere. To get a launch vehicle to a height of 100 miles (160 km) requires a vertical speed of 1.8 km/s; to keep a satellite in orbit at this altitude requires a horizontal speed of around 8 km/s (5 miles/s). Oh I think he does.[1] Rockets need speed. The problem is the atmosphere gets in the way, so you need as little of your flight to occur within the atmosphere as possible. That's why they go straight up, they get through MaxQ, which depends on both velocity and air pressure, and then they can start to accelerate to the required orbital velocity. Once past MaxQ they can safely begin to increase the horizontal velocity component with less and less atmosphere to worry about. Concorde could only go so fast, and had to fly extremely high (but still in the atmosphere) to achieve this speed, simply because the atmosphere got in the way, as it were. It was fighting its own MaxQ, but in a different way. Indeed. (To elaborate, the atmosphere exerts pressure on the rocket, and as the rocket accelerates, the pressure increases. However as it goes higher, the atmosphere thins, reducing the pressure. There is a moment of peak pressure some miles up, known as Max Q as you say, after which the thinning of the atmosphere outweighs the effect of the increasing speed, and there is also the problem of atmospheric heating…)
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Post by johntel on Aug 17, 2022 8:02:35 GMT
Elon Musk has tweeted to say that he is definitely NOT buying Manchester United. So he probably will.
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Post by crossbat11 on Aug 17, 2022 8:02:36 GMT
nickp/pjw1961 I suppose what I'm really saying here is that the hellishly difficult path to victory that Labour leaders are always confronted with has more sheer drops, twists and turns and back breaking climbs than any other trek in British politics. The rise of the SNP in Scotland has steepened the gradient too, with impending boundary changes making the path even trickier. It seems to me, especially with the size of the mountain bequeathed to him to climb, that Starmer, despite the current propitious political circumstances, has a Herculean task. A task that spine and socialist vision alone won't necessarily perform. I thought that the recent You Gov poll showing Labour now seen as less extreme than the Tories was interesting. This is good moderate and mainstream political terrain for Labour to occupy and, maybe, to win on too. Self evidently, not enough voters to win an election will ever coalesce around a party that is viewed as extreme. I'm not at all sure about some of this polling on specific economic and social policies that voters claim they want. I suspect they're really after something that makes things work and makes their lives better. That could be public ownership and a more progressive taxation system, if they can be convinced that those things will work better that way, but I don't think most voters are into political dogma and ideology. Telling them they need socialism, and this is what they're going to get in an open wide and swallow sort of way is not going to do it for Labour. My advice to Starmer would be to keep banging on about why Labour will make things work better. Some of that may indeed be socialism of sorts but not socialism for socialism's sake. It's a sort of getting there slowly, buggering on sort of politics. I'm competent, you can trust me and my party and we can build something better than this lot. I think he might get there like that, with a little help from the self-imploding Tories of course. I'm not sure I've ever been convinced that there is any other way for Labour to win.
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 17, 2022 8:08:24 GMT
I don’t know about Woomera tbh. I know they tested some scramjet hypersonic tech a few years ago, but don’t know about rockets. Not sure either about NASA, but I did read Musk making some criticism of horizontal launches: "… it seems like...you're high up there and so surely that's good and you're going at...0.7 or 0.8 Mach and you've got some speed and altitude, you can use a higher expansion ratio on the nozzle, doesn't all that add up to a meaningful improvement in payload to orbit? The answer is no, it does not, unfortunately. It's quite a small improvement. It's maybe a 5% improvement in payload to orbit...and then you've got this humungous plane to deal with. Which is just like having a stage. From SpaceX's standpoint, would it make more sense to have a gigantic plane or to increase the size of the first stage by five percent? Uhh, I'll take option two. And then, once you get beyond a certain scale, you just can't make the plane big enough. When you drop...the rocket, you have the slight problem that you're not going the right direction. If you look at what Orbital Sciences did with Pegasus, they have a delta wing to do the turn maneuver but then you've got this big wing that's added a bunch of mass and you've able to mostly, but not entirely, convert your horizontal velocity into vertical velocity, or mostly vertical velocity, and the net is really not great." I don't believe Musk knows what he's talking about. If you think about it, almost all of the velocity needed to put a satellite in orbit is horizontal, not vertical. Look at vertical launches and you see that the rocket launcher quite quickly turns over once it gets above the lower atmosphere. To get a launch vehicle to a height of 100 miles (160 km) requires a vertical speed of 1.8 km/s; to keep a satellite in orbit at this altitude requires a horizontal speed of around 8 km/s (5 miles/s). Well, there is the need to travel vertically to get beyond most of the atmosphere before your speed ramps up, in order to avoid too much pressure, as alurqa points out, but the atmosphere also causes considerable heating as you go faster (indeed this was an issue in the design of Concorde and a reason it travelled at higher altitudes than normal jets). incidentally, if you travel more vertically initially, you can use gravity to help pull you into the horizontal later, saving on fuel, known as a gravity turn. (It’s a similar principal to using the gravity of Jupiter to slingshot a probe towards the outer planets).
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Post by lululemonmustdobetter on Aug 17, 2022 8:14:43 GMT
Hi colinSorry but I'm quite disappointed with you on this. You claim to be on the side o women's rights in relation to topics such as Afghanistan - but think its ok to paint women in such a light as a joke! You have no idea what it feels like to be pregnant and its much more likely that the bloke will bugger off and leave the woman to fend for herself - imagine what the response from men would be if the 'joke' was coaxed in those term!
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 8:15:52 GMT
This article makes one realise that the Western Democracies really are beginning to face an alternative offering to the Rest of the World. . An unregulated bazaar run by pirates.:-
"Russia is leading an alliance of rogue states making a nonsense of western economic warfare.
Now sanctions busters have developed their own vocabulary as they try to outwit western attempts at financial warfare. “Black knights” are murky players like China who secretly take on commodities from sanctioned states, bought at a discount. Latvian blend? That’s how sanctioned Russian oil is being disguised.
As the supposedly five-day Russian invasion of Ukraine reaches the six-month mark so Vladimir Putin has expanded his club of heavily sanctioned regimes — among them, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela — into a self-helping association of law-breakers. The aim is both to keep wounded economies chugging along and to demonstrate that their will cannot be broken by what they see as the weaponisation of US financial markets in the world economy. For Ukraine, the current war is existential. For Putin, the war is being played for equally high stakes: not just to crush Ukrainian nationhood but also to demonstrate the limits of American power.
The high seas are thus becoming critical to the conflict. Ships are dodging global scrutiny by switching off their transponders. Russian commercial fleet operators failed to provide destination details on a third of its vessels in April. When entering foreign ports Russian vessels frequently hoist flags of convenience, from Sierra Leone and Panama for example, lest their cargos are seized. Goods are often transferred at night, typically from a sanctioned Iranian vessel to a non-sanctioned Chinese.
Moscow is earning $700 million a day from its crude oil exports. A crunch point approaches in December when European Union and British insurance companies will be prohibited from covering ships transporting Russian oil. The point: to achieve the aim of barring almost all imports of Russian oil by the end of the year. Evasion tactics are thus being tried out already by Putin’s sanctions busters. And their main substitute market is the global south. Groupings like Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation are becoming more and more like bazaars. Discounted oil from Russia is attractive to countries facing domestic unrest about fuel prices. Western spooks are concerned in particular about Russian lobbying of South Africa.
The US and European sanctions range, of course, well beyond the hydrocarbon industries. Crucially, the US has been trying to squeeze Moscow out of the dollar-based global financial system. The Kremlin has responded by trying to persuade its trading partners to use Russia’s Mir as an alternative to Swift, the western-based bank messaging system. But the fact remains that Russia and its cronies prefer old-fashioned barter. Since annexing Crimea in 2014, Moscow swaps its looted grain for Syrian olive oil and vegetables. Now it looks as if Iran will exchange car parts and gas turbines for Russian steel and minerals. Putin was already trying a variant of this before the 2022 invasion. He agreed to grant Bashar al-Assad hefty loans as long as Assad used the cash to pay for commodities from a list of Russian companies based in Syria. That is how the sanctioned of the world scratch each other’s back."
Times Roger Boyes
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 8:16:47 GMT
@danny - "So. This is a man made crisis caused by world lockdown..."
No it isn't. Please stop being so stupid.
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 8:22:19 GMT
Just a quick note to folks suggesting you check you fridges and freezers are working properly. Refrigeration can be one of the biggest hidden users of domestic electricity, and this is made more of an issue by the dreadful modern fad for fitted kitchens, where refrigeration units are often shoved into enclosed spaces with no ventilation of the cooling fins.
If you are able to, make sure there is adequate ventilation to the rear of the unit by creating an air gap between the fridge and the wall, and if the unit is under a counter, you ought to have ventilation grills in the surface so the warm air can dissipate from the back of the fridge.
Work occasionally checking the performance of fridges and freezers with a cheap power meter, as often failing units start excessive consumption for a long time before they actually fail. I once found a pub was using a quarter of it's entire electricity use on a single failing freezer, although to be fair, that was a large commercial model. However, the same principle applies to domestic refrigeration.
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 17, 2022 8:24:02 GMT
I see all these encouraging polls suggesting support for public ownership of the utilities and railways, more progressive taxation ...I now await, with baited breath, for the good citizens of this country to stop electing a party that has no intention of ever doing any of this and instead maybe putting someone in power who might. The problem is, Starmer has more or less said that Labour has "no intention of ever doing any of this". And none of them are any kind of Liberal policy either. So it's the Greens, in England at least. Who aren't going to win. Yes, the problem with electing right wing Labour, on the grounds that they might not be quite as bad as Tories*, is the problem of the right wing ratchet effect. If Tories get elected, and pull things rightwards, then left wing Labour get in, and pull things back leftwards again, it at least stops things getting worse over time. If instead Tories are followed by right wing Labour, who keep things broadly static, then each time Tories get in it can go even more rightwards. As it happens, it was partly the popularity of some of Corbyn’s policies that made Tories at least pretend to move leftwards a bit, and in some respects economically they did move leftwards under Johnson, compared with Cameronian Austerity. *although they tend to adopt policies that lock in right wing economics e.g. PFI, house price rises etc., and introduce extra angles for Tories to leverage further, e.g. free schools, privatising more of the NHS etc.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 8:25:07 GMT
Hi colin Sorry but I'm quite disappointed with you on this. You claim to be on the side o women's rights in relation to topics such as Afghanistan - but think its ok to paint women in such a light as a joke! You have no idea what it feels like to be pregnant and its much more likely that the bloke will bugger off and leave the woman to fend for herself - imagine what the response from men would be if the 'joke' was coaxed in those term! I just watched it again. I really don't get the offense. Its a light hearted ad. Everyone is portrayed as happy. I don't see the misogyny in it. Please don't question my opinion about the misogyny which condemns Afghan women to utter social exclusion. I think the offense being heaped upon them ( thanks to Trump/Biden & NATO) is not , in any conceivable manner, to be equated to the content of that Crown paint advert. I am quite disappointed that you think it is.
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Post by lululemonmustdobetter on Aug 17, 2022 8:25:38 GMT
Truss rejects Labour's plan - which, rightly or wrongly, is wildly popular - and insists on tax cuts instead which no one thinks will help the poorest. It is as if Labour have set a very obvious trap and she's charged straight into it. Zero political antennae. I think if I was a Tory MP I would be in a state of panic about her becoming PM. "She said: We’re still in the leadership contest at the moment. Now, my priority is reducing taxes so people can keep more of their own money at the same time as making sure we boost energy supply. It is wrong to just keep sticking plasters on this problem. What we actually need to do is make sure we are unleashing more energy, for example, from the North Sea. We’re investing in technologies like nuclear, and we’re finding more renewable energy as well." Hi pjw1961Personally, I get the sense that her basic political instincts and ability to think on her feet are poor, hence the what appear to be knee-jerk responses which she has to retract later. Its like she is trying to imitate Johnson's style - but where he could pull it off (till it finally came crashing down) she can't. The net effect will be that she doesn't come across as 'authentic' - which is what we are told these days appeals most to punters.
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c-a-r-f-r-e-w
Member
A step on the way toward the demise of the liberal elite? Or just a blip…
Posts: 6,175
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Post by c-a-r-f-r-e-w on Aug 17, 2022 8:36:37 GMT
c-a-r-f-r-e-w Very interesting stuff about horizontal and vertical launches. Do I remember correctly that some of the Woomera launches were horizontal on rails that then turned vertical? Or was that just an idea that never happened? I've tried (not very hard) to google the answer. Anyway as there are some advantages to horizontal it makes me wonder why NASA and Musk don't use it at least some of the time. Or you could just lob them into orbit. Saves on the 747 bit. :-) www.spinlaunch.comedition.cnn.com/2022/06/14/tech/spinlaunch-ceo-yaney-interview-scn-spc-intl/index.htmlSpinLaunch wants to radically redesign rocketry. Will its tech work? A California startup wants to put satellites into a circular chamber and whip them around to more than 5,000 miles per hour before letting them burst out, allowing a rocket to fire up its engine only after it's escaped the smothering tug of Earth's gravity. Humanity has been putting objects into orbit for six decades now. This is not how it's been done. Is it possible? The answer is different depending on who you ask.yes, that’s an interesting approach Al. Dunno if you’ve come across Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel? I mentioned it a couple of times on the old board. He does some very good explanations of different methods of getting into orbit, space elevators and all that. I particularly like Skyhooks: youtu.be/TlpFzn_Y-F0(Lots of other stuff too, disc worlds, Dyson spheres…)
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